innovation

Plenty of coworking spaces talk about sustainability; Apocapoc built its whole identity on it. Founded in 2013 by a documentary filmmaker, a tech entrepreneur and a motion-graphics designer – Valérie, Fabien and Sébastien – Barcelona’s first green coworking opened in a converted grain factory in El Born, with cork-insulated floors and furniture pieced together from recovered wood and reworked metal. The name announced the method: a poc a poc means “little by little” in Catalan.

Little by little turned out to mean something much bigger. In 2017 the founders scaled the experiment into Nest City Lab, an old foundry in Poblenou’s 22@ district – the heart of the city’s former factory belt – rebuilt to LEED Platinum standard, salvaging what the building could give, down to the industrial bridge crane that did the heavy lifting during construction. The name on the door has changed; the ethos hasn’t.

The space hosts around 170 coworkers – freelancers, craft entrepreneurs and small companies chosen, as ever, to fit the project – alongside some 400 square meters of urban permaculture. A fig tree anchors the edible forest in the central atrium, an urban farm grows greens on aeroponic towers, and there’s a vegetarian kitchen, a media center and rooms for yoga and mindfulness. The calendar runs from permaculture design courses to talks on regenerative cities.

They describe it as an urban laboratory for sustainability. Over a decade in, little by little is adding up.